Saturday March 25, 2017

I thought I had seen a headline about Uber’s self-driving tech being crap compared to the other players, and this story suggests that could have been pretty accurate. The photo shows an Uber Volvo self-driving SUV on its side after a bad accident, which is total poetry, based on the state of the company these days. At first I thought this was just a test vehicle, but apparently it was a normal-service car that may have had passengers. Thanks to Kyle and cageymaru for this one.

Uber’s self-driving car program has also been mired in controversy. Waymo, Alphabet Inc.’s autonomous driving business, sued an Uber unit called Otto earlier this year for allegedly stealing designs for an important component of driverless cars known as lidar. Uber called the suit "baseless." The photo, showing the Uber SUV on its side, suggests a relatively high-impact crash. That would be a contrast to the incidents involving self-driving cars tested by Waymo. In more than two million miles of testing on public roads, Waymo’s vehicles were mostly minor incidents, often when other cars drove into the back of their vehicles in busy areas.